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Batteries not included

Cut the juice to a storage array and it will try to minimize data loss largely by switching to battery power to keep what's in the system's cache intact until it can be written to disk. But in a move that threatens to send the Energizer bunny to the unemployment line, Dot Hill Systems--a storage company whose products are often OEMed--has eliminated the need for batteries to protect a storage array's cache. Dot Hill's 2730 Turbo storage controller uses super capacitors instead of batteries to power its cache backup. Capacitors, which are based on engineering theories that have been around for approximately 250 years, can store electricity until it's needed. Super capacitors are pumped-up versions of the tiny electrical devices that can store enough energy to be viable as battery replacements. Dot Hill's design has been picked up and rebranded by several storage vendors, including Fujitsu and ONStor with its Pantera Clustered NAS. --Rich Castagna

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Fibre Channel directors are the choice for consolidating isolated SAN fabrics. Brocade's 48000 Director and Cisco's MDS 9513 Multilayer Director are the undisputed leaders in this small field, but they offer very different paths to storage services and consolidation options. We'll help you decide which company's product is the best director for your storage environment.

Most companies don't have a detailed policy that governs what data they need to keep and what data should be destroyed. Deciding on the destruction levels you're comfortable with is the easiest part of this puzzle. The most complicated piece is figuring out what to destroy and when, and then sticking to it.

With so many archiving systems on the market, putting together a request for proposal (RFP) for an archiving program for structured, semistructured or unstructured data is a key step. It's equally important that your team is well-prepared to evaluate vendor proposals so you'll end up with a product that fits your company's needs at a price that doesn't break your budget.

dump is a powerful tool to back up Unix files. In this excerpt from W. Curtis Preston's new book, Backup & Recovery: Inexpensive Backup Solutions for Open Systems, the dump utility is described in detail, including how it works, when to use it and exactly what can go wrong at various stages of the dump backup process.

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A simple data recovery solution is one that has the least amount of customization and is implemented with out-of-the-box technologies. If you need to create full-time positions to support your data recovery solution, it's time for a reality check.

New FRCP regulations, in addition to other compliancy requirements, have led many IT departments to deploy enterprise search within business apps such as ecommerce and custom portal software. But these search apps can also be leveraged to make good use of the treasure trove of information that's sitting idle within enterprise storage systems.